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1·4 months agoAnd to be clear, the use of “state” in your quote was the generic sense of the word.
(emphasis added)
The local govs taking direct action. The state gov may be controlled by human rights hostile republicans at the state level, but there are many smaller governments within the state controlled by liberals.
And to be clear, the use of “state” in your quote was the generic sense of the word.
I mean, again, you’re claiming if Republicans get rid of minimum wage
Min wage is entirely different than what these bans are about. There are no wages in this context. This is about a flat periodic income for non-wage earners for the most part.
then they’ll have to come up with some state-sponsored plan to get Bob his shoes when the inevitable wage reduction makes shoes even more unaffordable.
You’re confused about how these bans work. If they don’t want to give Bob a flat living income from state funds at the state level, a ban is pointless because they can simply neglect to provide the money (as they already control the policy and money at the state level). The purpose of a ban is to prevent lower governments from acting. So if they implement a state-level statute banning Bob getting min income, city/county X can cannot give Bob a min income but they can still buy Bob a pair of shoes. Hence how it can backfire.
I’ve seen public libraries with sewing machines. So for example a librarian could theoretically use it to help Bob construct a pair of shoes using material that’s supplied by public money to the libraries. Such an outcome is a game of whack-a-mole… The republicans would have to discover that’s happening and then legislate against it separately.
You say this like they have any decency or shame.
I”m not sure how you arrive at that. You seem to have missed my point. That is, if the republicans get what they want (a ban on min incomes), they could end up getting as a consequence something they want even less: the state getting involved in commerce in the course of upholding human rights legal obligations.
It makes little sense because they know full well the money will spent one way or another. So most likely this is a political tactic for something else. If there is a segment of unmotivated R voters somewhere but a strong likelihood that they would be more motivated to the polls if there were a proposition to ban any form of welfare, getting a proposition on the ballot would actually just be a trick to get more people turning out for Trump (because they will tick the Trump box while they are there).
What matters to republicans the most is not any kind of values or ideology; it’s simply nothing more than taking and holding power.
IIRC it was the Bush election where the republicans put a proposition on the ballot for gay marriage. Superficially you would think “sure, the republicans want to stop gay marriage”. But in reality the republican politicians did not care about gay marriage at all. They cared about a segment of elderly non-voting christian right conservatives. Those voters could not be motivated to get off their asses and travel to the polls to vote for Bush, but they would be damned if gays could get married, so they were highly motivated to vote in that election and of course while they are in the voting booth they ticked the Bush box. The gay marriage proposition was just a trick to get more votes for candidates.
This is why I’m so disgusted every time someone says “republicans and democrats are basically the same”, which I most often hear from Europeans.
I would love to see this backfire. If they ban min. incomes whilst being a human rights signatory, it means the state must buy food, shelter, and clothes, which means that portion of commerce would be outside of their “capitalist utopia” as the state would decide where to buy Bob’s shoes, or perhaps even make Bob a pair of shoes. It can (and should) backfire spectacularly for them.
Sure, but then republicans are well into the territory of “I don’t like the facts”. They need to be told to work on trying to un-sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (from 1948?) before they can make what they consider “progress” in their minds.
from the article:
“I never thought we would be going down the socialist road,” Gillette told BI. “I spent 35 years in the Army fighting communism, fighting terrorism. Now we’re slipping. The left is pushing us toward the socialist program.”
LOL… I read that as: “help! We’re slipping past the 1940s because of the commies and socialists!”
Glad to see CFPB might be growing their balls back after Trump neutered them. When Trump was in power the CFPB took no action on complaints of unlawful conduct and seemed quite inactive… as if to just be managing their own office (like the EPA).
That’s a great move. Instead of trying to regulate the baddies just offer a more honest, transparent consumer-respecting option from a public service that respects people’s privacy (CFPB does not block Tor, unlike #CreditKarma and #LendingTree).
I would love it even more if they would also enable people to deselect banks they want to avoid, such as the shit banks on this list:
https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/usa_banks.md
I’m saying when I personally used the word “state” in the bit that you quoted, I was using the generic meaning of state. It’s an overloaded word (multiple meanings). What I mean by the “generic meaning” is that I was not referring to the state level jurisdiction. E.g. if the context were Texas, my use of the word “state” was not the state of Texas in that quote. The word state can simply mean government at any level. A federal government (aka nation state) can also generically be referred to as the “state”, even though it’s not state as the jurisdictional construct that composes the United States.
Likewise, even a local government like a city or county can be generically called the “state”. So to answer your question, the state of Texas can ban welfare checks from the state level in the whole state of Texas, but a lower (non-republican controlled) government can circumvent that by offering food and shelter instead of checks.
Welfare can happen at any level. I went to the emergency room and racked up a 4-figure hospital bill, and said “I have no insurance or income”. It was no problem… the county had financial aid that I qualified for. The county paid the bill for me, not the state¹ or fed.